If you've enjoyed my writing about space over the years, I invite you to subscribe to my new substack newsletter, titled ' Mars for the Rest of Us ', where I've been posting weekly essays on topics around Mars exploration. Here are two recent free posts: Musk on Mars : a timeline of Elon Musk's shifting public commitments to Mars settlement. A Primer on Long-Duration Life Support : an overview of the state of the art in regenerative life support, and technology gaps for Mars. And so...

William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize for their work on the “transistor effect.” Via Wikipedia . As we’ve noted more than a few times before , for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US. As part of its ongoing efforts to provide universal telephone service, Bell Labs generated numerous world-changing inventions, and accumulated more Nobel Prizes than any other industrial resear...

Anthropic carried a study, done by getting its model to interview some 80,000 users to understand their opinions about AI, what they hope from it, and what they fear. Two things stood out to me. It’s easy to assume there are AI optimists and AI pessimists, divided into separate camps. But what we actually found were people organized around what they value—financial security, learning, human connection— watching advancing AI capabilities while managing both hope and fear at once. ...

Is the heyday of the data scientist over? The Harvard Business Review once called it “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century.” 1 In tech, data scientist roles were often among the best paid. 2 The job also demanded an unusual mix of skills: Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician. — JosH100 ( @josh_wills ) May 3, 2012 In addition to creating a high-barrier to entry, these skills ...

Today we’re shining a bright spotlight on recent work from our Programmable Ink research area — visualizable computation, software you can put your hands on, and a grimoire of rune stones and imagination. For the past few years, we’ve been quietly building a holistic, malleable notebook we call PlayBook . The goal is to make something that feels every bit as good as paper & pencil for sketching and writing in your own hand. But unlike paper, PlayBook is imbued with dynamic behavio...

cathedral (cat·he·dral) Having the form of a cat. cathedral (cat·he·dral) Having the form of a cat. cathedral (cat·he·dral) Having the form of a cat. cathedral (cat·he·dral)

Building a tiny JavaScript runtime on top of QuickJS with timers, file I/O, and an event loop. Building a tiny JavaScript runtime on top of QuickJS with timers, file I/O, and an event loop.

You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. — Alvin Toffler A rule (or boundary) turns a theoretical or philosophical stance into a clearly defined behavior: Do this , and your behaviors align with your belief. Congruence.  Do that , and you miss it. Conflict.  Internal conflict doesn't feel good. Break dumb rules . Break arbitrary small rules (or don’t). Break rules that exist only t...

In my last post, I showed you to use FireWire on a Raspberry Pi with a PCI Express IEEE 1394 adapter. Now I'll show you how I'm using a new FireWire HAT and a PiSugar3 Plus battery to make a portable MRU, or 'Memory Recording Unit', to replace tape in older FireWire/i.Link/DV cameras. The alternative is an old used MRU like Sony's HVR-MRC1 , which runs around $300 on eBay 1 . In my last post, I showed you to use FireWire on a Raspberry Pi with a PCI Express IEEE 1394 adapter. No...

As a non-Java coder, for the last ten years I’ve stumbled my way through the JVM-centric world of "big data" (as it was called then), relying on my wits with SQL and config files to just about muddle through. One of the things that drew me to Kafka Connect was that I could build integrations between Kafka and other systems without needing to write Java, and the same again for ksqlDB and Flink SQL—now stream processing was available to mere RDBMS mortals and not just the Java adonises. ...

SAN DIEGO – March 26, 2026 – Shield AI today announced it is raising $1.5 billion in Series G funding at a $12.7 billion post-money valuation and $500 million in fixed-return preferred equity financing. The Series G is led by Advent International and co-led by the Strategic Investment Group of JPMorganChase’s Security and Resiliency Initiative, with participation from existing investors Snowpoint Ventures, InnovationX, Riot Ventures, Disruptive, Apandion, and others. Funds managed by Black...

A Python project got hacked where malicious releases were directly uploaded to PyPI . I said on Mastodon that had the project used trusted publishing with digital attestations , then people using a pylock.toml file would have noticed something odd was going on thanks to the lock file including attestation data . That led to someone asking for a link to something to explain what I meant . I didn't have a link handy since it's buried in 4 years and over 1,800 comments of discussion , s...

It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security. After all, if you’re the only person who can work on a system, they can’t fire you. There’s a related take that “nobody gets promoted for simplicity” : in other words, engineers who deliver overcomplicated crap will be promoted, because their work looks more impressive to non-technical managers. There’s a grain of truth in this, of course. As I’ve said b...

It's been a little over a year since I bought my Framework 13 laptop and shared my initial thoughts , so I thought it would be a good time to provide you guys with an update on what I like, and dislike about this plucky little laptop. Performance I think this is a good place to start since my previous laptop was an M1 MacBook Air, which I loved , but the paltry 256GB of storage, and the fact that it would inevitably be killed off artificially by Apple, I decided to jump ship, and the Frame...

High table dinner at Magdalen My time in Oxford has come to an end and I head back to Chicago this week. I was a visiting Fellow at Magdalen (pronounced "maudlin") College for the Hilary Term. There's a six week break between the eight-week Hilary and Trinity terms. They work the fellows hard during the terms with teaching, tutoring, admissions, hiring and various other administrative functions. All the events, seminars, workshops, high-table dinners are scheduled during the term. Pretty much no...

We love generative testing in the world of query languages, because languages in general are in a lot of ways, too complex to test by hand. There's an exponential number of combinations of features that could be involved in any given query. Database query optimizers do a lot of work to detect when those features are used together in ways that permit better execution. This is great, and important, especially when queries are generated by the composition of various tools that might not be aware of...

Gimkit Live has a built-in accessibility feature that reads questions and answer choices aloud to students as they play. It’s called Read to Me. By default, it’s off — each student turns it on individually during a game. The process takes under a minute and requires no teacher setup. Here’s how it works. How to Enable Read to Me in Gimkit Students activate Read to Me on their own device during an active Gimkit Live session. Teachers don’t need to configure anything beforehand. Be...

A few weeks ago I made Amie , an application for keeping track of who you meet at conferences. Amie lets you create an event, then add people by name and/or domain, Mastodon, or BlueSky handle. 1 I was inspired to build Amie because I went to a web meetup a few months ago where I met many people with websites. I wanted a better way to keep track of the sites people shared with me than to leave browser tabs open on my phone, which I may accidentally close or otherwise lose track of. I haven’t...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nikhil Anand, whose blog can be found at nikhil.io . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hi I'm Nikhil! I grew up the UAE and came to the Un...

The next C++ standard (C++26) is getting exciting new features. One of these features is compile-time reflection . It is ideally suited to serialize and deserialize data at high speed. To test it out, we extended our fast JSON library ( simdjson ) and we gave a talk at CppCon 2025. The video is out on YouTube. Our slides are also available . The next C++ standard (C++26) is getting exciting new features. One of these features is compile-time reflection . It is ideally suited to serializ...

RSECon26 is happening in Sheffield in September. After spending two days talking to people about LLMs and research software engineering, I think the conference will be a golden opportunity to find out how people are currently using LLMs in their work. Invite people to take part in a 90-minute session (which, once they’re set up, will give you about an hour of useful time). Give them two small problems to solve: one that requires writing code from scratch, one in which ...

This blog flew past 1,024 pages, and I didn’t even notice. At ten posts per page, that means there are now more than 10,240 posts, or about a quarter of a J-Walk Blog . Some posts are even good. I’d better install PAE onto Hugo, or it won’t be able to address any new posts. AAAAAAH! I like to remind people I’m funny, or they’d forget. See also Dragonfly BSD The Wikipedia article on beans By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-03-25. This blog flew past 1,024 pages, an...

After considerable effort and time, I think it's time to talk about some challenges the IT community faces over AI adoption. This entire article represents my thoughts and opinions only. Most AI adoption frameworks are targeted at the C-suite, and if you're a consulting company you likely want to target decision makers, and not IT. If you're a tooling company or AI provider, you talk up the org chart selling your product. I'll go into depth here talking across the org to fellow practitioner...